Very recently Professor Rosamond McKitterick had a significant birthday and, seeing this coming from some way off, various of her students had had the idea of a birthday conference. This, and its title which forms the subject header, was largely the brainchild of Richard Pollard, who also designed the monogram you see above and generally did the bulk of the donkey-work while the rest of us who were in one way or another participating kept quiet, tried not to tell ask anyone for help that wouldn’t be able to do similarly and, in the case of David McKitterick, her husband, made sure she kept the relevant weekend free without explaining why. And duly at 14:00 on September 12th she was escorted into Trinity College in Cambridge and found a gathering of about forty of her fellows, erstwhile and current students there basically to say thanks. As the person in that gathering with, I think, the longest hair other than Rosamond herself, and possibly one or two of the younger women, I feel myself uniquely qualified to say, “there was a whole lot of love in that room, man”. She’s had an awful lot of students and a lot of them have gone on to be important themselves. Some of us still hoping, also. But, well, it’s a conference. With due discretion and all that, obviously I’m still gonna blog it, if only to list the names…

Rosamond McKitterick, Professor of Medieval History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

The folder I have my notes stashed in has the monogram on the front. It contains a short biography of Rosamond, the programme, a map and contact details (all very well to hand out on arrival, but surely only useful before! this is my only criticism of the organisation) and a full or as-near-full-as-possible bibliography of Rosamond’s work, which registers (deep breath) six monographs, another co-written, six volumes of essays that she edited, another that she co-edited, and two volumes of collected papers, and eighty-two articles and chapters (not including stuff in the volumes she edited), one alone of which was co-written. If you don’t know Rosamond’s work, this may give you an idea that she is an important scholar in quantity as well as quality. Then, on the specially-printed notepaper (why yes, they did get some funding since you ask…), we have notes on the following papers.

Keynote Address

Janet Nelson, “New Approaches to Carolingian Reform, or 1969, 1971, 1977 and All That”. The keynote address, which placed Rosamond in the context of her teaching by Walter Ullmann, something that Jinty also went through, and drawing the roots of Rosamond’s first work into the many branches it now has, full of shared remembrance and intriguing background that could have been supplied by no-one else.

Session 1. The Reformatio monastica karolina

Marios Costambeys, “Paul the Deacon, Rome and the Carolingian Reforms”. Argued that Paul the Deacon‘s conception of Rome deliberately ignores its Christian and recent Imperial heritage, referring to it in terms of its earliest history to place both its history and the new Frankish rule in inarguable and uncontested Antiquity.

Rutger Kramer, “The Cloister in the Rye: Saint-Seine and the early years of Benedict of Aniane”. More or less as title except that that was the only terrible pun involved, a critical reading of the Vita Benedicti Anianensis pondering whether Benedict was in fact at first one of Carloman’s party not Charlemagne’s and how far his initial monastic conversion might have been a political retreat, then moving into questions of how his initial drive for asceticism apparently transformed to a desire for uniformity ‘that we can believe in’.

Sven Meeder, “Unity and Uniformity in the Carolingian Reform Efforts”. Argued that the Carolingian ideal of unity should not be mistaken for uniformity and that it was always ready to accept a good deal of diversity to which its own efforts only added. Arguable, but probably not with the Oxford English Dictionary definitions used; Susan Reynolds would have been unable to stay quiet in questions had she been there.

Some critical questions here especially for the latter two papers, and perhaps most notable among them James Palmer asking if, in fact, Carolingian reform could ever have succeeded adequately for its proponents or whether a perception of failure was built in. Sven responded, I think wisely, that the ultimate aim was to make the kingdom favoured by God and so the proof would be seen in events. It’s an interesting cycle of paranoia that this kind of drive might have set up, however. I think we see something similar with Æthelred the Unready‘s vain attempts to prescribe extra piety when the Danes just keep coming in his autumn years.

Session 2. Reform from without, reforms to without

Benedict Coffin, “The Carolingian Reformation in the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Churches”. Drawing out even more similarities between Carolingian and English reform movements as well as a few crucial differences, not least that in England it was primarily Benedictine not royal.

Jonathan Jarrett, “Nuns, Signatures and Literacy in late-Carolingian Catalonia”. You basically saw a chunk of this paper already, and I had to leave a lot of detail out, but it went OK and did everything I hoped for. Completely overwhelmed however by…

Julia M. H. Smith, “Wrapped, Tied and Labelled: importing Jerusalem, recycling Rome in the early Middle Ages”, exploring the contents of the altar in the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran in Rome, which transpires to have been installed by Leo III and to have contained, in 1906 when it was last opened, a mind-boggling assortment of Holy Land soil, branches, twigs, etc. from significant places there, as well as martyr relics probably from the other patriarchal sees, replacing Rome’s pagan history with a new one imported from Jerusalem and elsewhere. The illustrations were fascinating and it was a really interesting paper.

Behind those grilles is the box installed by Leo III

The evening was rounded off, well, for me at least, with a pre-dinner paper given by Yitzhak Hen. I won’t attempt to describe that here except to say that what I’ve written about his work here before may have failed to take his sense of humour into account. Then, there was a wine reception and a dinner, but I, with my usual mismatch of engagements, ran into London for one of the best gigs I’ve been to for a long time. But I was back the next day, aching of neck and back and short of sleep, and I will describe that later.

The second article in this book I’m reading, not counting the introduction and the mises-au-point that Michael McCormick supplies for each section, is as I said by Joachim Henning and it’s a bit less limpid.1 The argument is basically that finds of slave-chains match up with settlement patterns to suggest that:

The Romans didn’t allow Germanic-style village farmstead sort of affairs with individual enclosures, but the barbarians on their borders farmed like that normally

Once the Germans are on the inside Merovingian Francia is full of that sort of settlement, agricultural slavery inside the old imperial limes is basically over and slavery becomes something you only see on the military frontier

Under the Carolingians however some of the Roman unification of settlements into grand estates resumes and this is bad for the economy

What we have here is basically two patterns, of slave-chain finds and of settlement nucleation, on which is being hung an awful lot, as well as some problematic stuff about the spread of the heavy plough that I thought we’d got over by now. An awful lot is hanging from those chains but they self-evidently don’t reliably index the whole slavery complex; they only show that someone had to be constrained. These could be military captives, their absence still wouldn’t prove that the people who worked an estate weren’t bound to it by fear, threat and the law.

Then, an awful lot hangs from the belief that the evidence shows that bipartite estates were less efficient agriculturally than decentralised farming because of the need for coercion. Philosophically this seems likely to be right, and one could cite the collective farms of the Soviet Union as well as studies of plantation slavery in the USA to show that people work harder when they work for themselves (and Henning has a nice example to counter Chris Wickham’s belief that where there are no lords the peasants eat more and work less).2 All the same, there is an issue here: we are asked to believe that the Carolingian nobility, or the US planters, must have been status-hungry megalomaniacs, otherwise they’d have realised that ‘slavery does not pay’.3 But think about it: the question is not about how much their estates produced, at least in the Frankish case, it’s about how much of that production they could appropriate. If labour on your estate is 10% less effective for being combined and worked as a demesne compared to hutted coloni working their own plots, but you can get 5% more labour out of the slaves for having them right there and that also means you can impose renders with 7% greater efficiency (or other made-up figures that would work, if these don’t), then you as lord are in profit and it does make economic sense. But Henning has a basic ‘slavery is bad mkay’ assumption here that makes it difficult for him to see this. I mean, I agree with that statement, but the estate managers in any of those periods obviously didn’t hold that conviction, that doesn’t make them stupid. And then it doesn’t help that, as Angeliki Laiou points out in the response at the end of the section, that the slave-chain finds for the Carolingian period don’t occur in the areas where there were bipartite estates.4 That is, unlike the Roman slave estates apparently the Carolingian ones didn’t use chain-gangs but got their labour more willingly. So, er, hang on, where did that paradigm go? There are some points here but they aren’t all the ones the author feels that he’s made.

Plan of a generic medieval manor taken from William Shepherd, Historical Atlas (New York 1923) for Wikimedia Commons

On the whole what I take from this is that being part of the Roman fiscal complex tended to produce a different kind of estate organisation, and that the Carolingians also did some of that. I take with more salt the idea that the Carolingian period might have been less well off than the Merovingian period, and if I accept it I would again want to blame the weather for most of that and wonder if the conversion to bipartite estates in places where that can be done isn’t more of a response, both to diminishing yields and also to newly huge scales of estate ownership.5 (In other words, Chris’s ‘aristocrats make complexity’ argument tied up with my own macro-economic ones.) I don’t think slave-chains prove what Henning thinks they do, though the distribution is interesting (if, as he admits, potentially faulty).6 But most of all I wonder whether the horse of cause is not before the cart of effect here. Even if we accept the correlations Henning proposes, correlation is not causation, and the causation is still to be sorted out I think.

We’ll get back to my orphan papers at some point: I’m going to have a lot to blog over the next few days.

1. Joachim Henning, “Strong rulers—weak economy? Rome, the Carolingians, and the archaeology of slavery in the 1st millennium AD” in Jennifer R. Davis & Michael McCormick (edd.), The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: new directions in early medieval studies (Aldershot 2008), pp. 33-53.

2. His argument here is based on the fact that lots of Roman goods are found in villages beyond the limes, what implies that they had enough surplus to buy stuff, and presumably, wanted to produce surplus so as to be able to buy stuff: Henning, “Strong rulers?”, pp. 41-42, citing Chris Wickham, Land and Power: studies in Italian and European social history, 400-1200 (London 1994), p. 224, whose original printing was in idem, “Problems of Comparing Rural Societies in Early Medieval Western Europe” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series Vol. 2 (Cambridge 1992), pp. 221-246, repr. in idem, Land and Power pp. 201-226.

3. Though it should be noted that, according to the work there linked, the US studies actually tended to show that it did pay: Robert William Fogel, “Coming to Terms with the Economic Viability of Slavery” in idem, The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: a retrospective, Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History (Baton Rouge 2003), pp. 24-48. For the application of older work in this line to the medieval question, see Pierre Bonnassie, “Survie et extinction du régime esclavagiste dans l’occident du haut moyen âge (IV-XI s.)” in Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale Vol. 28 (Poitiers 1985), pp. 307-343, transl. J. Birrell as “The Survival and Extinction of the System of Slavery in the Early Medieval West, fourth to eleventh centuries” in Bonnassie, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe (Cambridge 1991), pp. 1-59. One of Bonnassie’s more appealing features to a modern reader is his humanist outrage at coercion, oppression and brutality but here, I think, it prejudiced his ability to analyse the sources clearly.

4. Angeliki E. Laiou, “The Early Medieval Economy: Data, Production, Exchange and Demand” in Davis & McCormick, Long Morning, pp. 99-104. One of the best things about this book is that they did the peer review internally, but the authors get to keep their original conclusions. It’s like the discussion at the Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo being published, but more worked-out, and I think we should do this all the time so that people can tell more easily where more consideration is needed and where there was a genuinely good point made.

Your humble author was, at the time of writing the first part of this, doing a caffeine detox and so was having trouble constructing reportage and opinion at his usual standard of prolixity and perceptiveness. Here therefore is some distraction:

First of all, here is a fine collection of observations through the ages on the now-vanished Anglo-Saxon bishopric of Dunwich with some sobering musings about what else could go the same way. I can’t remember where I got this from but somebody isn’t getting a hat-tip that they deserve, sorry.

Even the most disinterested historian has at least one preconception, which is the fixed idea that he has none.

Such research, valuable not in itself but for some ulterior purpose, will be of little import except in so far as it is transmuted into common knowledge. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.

and, most important of all perhaps:

Nor need our labors be the less highly prized because our task is limited, our contributions of incidental and temporary significance. History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor, since it makes, as Santayana says, a gift of “great interests … to the heart.”

I’ll never match that, but I love it anyway.

Gold strip with Biblical inscription from the Staffordshire hoard

Lastly, and added in the final stages of editing this much-delayed post, of course you’ve already seen this? If you haven’t, the biggest ever hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold was found back in July somewhere undisclosed in Staffordshire and the news was allowed out yesterday morning. Past Horizons has the press release, the BBC story that is linked through the picture has the simple version and some more pictures, but if you want them the whole hoard is available in Creative Commons-licensed photographs on the Portable Antiquities Scheme’s Flickr stream. There is a lot of gold. Now obviously there has been talk of little else in my department since we got the news (which was no sooner than anyone else, in fact, probably because there are no coins in the hoard even though the Guardian was claiming that there were) and I’m pretty sure what I think the interpretation should be, but I have twelve (12), my god, twelve posts queued up here, which I let Professor Deyermond’s obit jump because that was the least respect demanded but which I would like not to let anything else delay. So you’ll have to wait a few days for my opinions, but that’s OK because it’ll take you at least a week to finish looking at the 615 pictures…

Alan Deyermond, photographed for the Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas

In the midst of life we are in death. On Friday 18 September I happened to come round a corner just in time to witness the death of a honeybee that hadn’t stopped to wonder what that eight-legged thing was doing apparently suspended in mid-air next to its desired flightpath. The resultant mortal combat was viciously quick. Now, as I begin this post on the 21st, I do so because news has just reached me of the death of Alan Deyermond, Professor Emeritus of Medieval Spanish Literature at Queen Mary University of London, Fellow of the British Academy and Corresponding Fellow of the Real Academia Española, who passed away in hospital after several months of illness, the day after I watched the bee die, 19th September.

Yes, I know I was writing about something else but this is important. If you’re working on the early Middle Ages, especially the Continental early Middle Ages, you need to get hold of a copy of Jennifer Davis’s and Michael McCormick’s The Long Morning of Medieval Europe.1 I got it mainly because I was citing something in that my erstwhile supervisor had written from a pre-print and needed up-to-date page numbers (and also knew that that was good, and that the other stuff in it looked interesting). But only this last week have I got round to actually reading the rest. I’m a fool. While it acknowledgedly doesn’t cover the whole field, and the editors say that they don’t think this could be done by a single volume, they have nonetheless done their utmost to provide a genuine state-of-the-field discourse for each of the themes they do cover.2 So, for example, the section on the economy has an intro by McCormick, then twelve absolutely crystal pages by Chris Wickham (who, as that link shows, has finally let himself be pictured on the Internet) explaining how he now sees the European economic system of the early Middle Ages having written his Framing the Early Middle Ages, then Joachim Henning explaining economy at the village level, and so on, and after reading all the essays you’d be set not just to answer an essay question but possibly to teach one. And it’s all sharp and up to date and written by some of the top experts in the field and it reads a lot like a quick way to get up to date on a lot of important thinking.

So I should have read it immediately, but I didn’t realise. As a consequence I’ve sounded off about Michael McCormick’s particular bee in the science-in-history bonnet here on the basis of a magazine article when there’s an actual scholarly discussion of it by him here.3 And someone has mailed me for help with the early medieval economy asking the very pertinent question, ‘if all these big estates are generating so much stuff for market, who’s buying it?’ to which I made some suggestions about poor relief and the correspondent wisely said something about feeding armies. Well, Chris asks the same question a few pages in and gives an answer to it, although characteristically he blames aristocrats: “I am not fond of aristocrats, but one does not have to like them to recognise their importance.”4 The argument is that by having the buying power to drive networks over which long-distance luxury trade could operate, and by needing to buy in bulk for followers and households, the big nobility caused the construction of complex exchange systems for those luxuries that other lower-level, bigger bulk forms of exchange could also use. Where the aristocrats were poor, exchange was short-range; where they were rich, all kinds of things travelled a long way. The chronologies of decline and recovery should be seen, firstly as plural and regional (and powered by politics), and secondly as actually being chronologies of simplification and recovery of complexity. We may not all agree (I still blame the weather, but then there’s a paper in here about that too) but he’s asking the crucial question about demand, whereas we have usually before only tried to answer ones about supply and distribution.

Now one can argue with details. I think for example that my correspondent’s suggestion about military provisioning and indeed mine about poor relief need to be in the demand picture as well. I think that saying that what the limited evidence for long-distance exchange of salt mainly tells us is that there was nothing more interesting being traded and moving on is, well, shying at a fence that needs jumping; there’s almost no work on this. And one can wonder whether Chris’s Marxism leads him to discount peasant initiative too early (because, dammit, workers controlling their fates comes later in the dialectic!) given pioneers, migrant labourers, and the special problem of the artisan class, who may have been few but occupy an ambiguous place with regard to the means of production in this period, and perhaps in any. OK, adding value through work to raw materials is something any factory hand does, but is manufacture of luxuries for an élite really a working class activity? Smiths are important men. What class is a swordsmith? Moneyers are important too, though there is argument over how important; but then they don’t actually hammer the coins out themselves. And so on. But basically, arguing these points is how to progress from here; I’m talking refinements, not revisionism. So do yourself a favour and keep up with the top-flight by having a look at this here, I reckon. Meanwhile, it will be blogged…

2.Eidem, “Introduction. The Early Middle Ages: Europe’s long morning”, ibid. pp. 1-10 at p. 7: “Echoing slow transformation and abrupt change, the studies in this book include close readings of particular moments such as Charlemagne’s empire or King Wamba’s triumph, as well as analyses of gradual shifts underlying economic systems or the perception of weather. Such a dynamic field of investigation defies the compass of a single volume.”

Furthest of all, perhaps, is a piece with the working title “The Identity of Authority in late-Carolingian Catalonia”. This was originally going to pose, and answer, the question of the rights by which people in my area claimed to or felt that they held power. Actually aspects of that have now been swallowed into ‘Legends in their Lifetime’, which I’ll talk about in another post, and into ‘Succession to the Fisc’ below, and so I don’t quite know what it will eventually cover, but it will get written, because it’s supposed to be the first output from my next big research project and so if I ever get to do that project there will certainly be an initial paper saying, “See what I have found!” This will be it. Not hurrying this because really, unless someone gives me a job where I don’t have to run to stay up with teaching all the time—something I’m expecting to have to do initially—the project is years off. However, I now think that a version of it may surface as 2010’s Leeds paper if I don’t think of anything else.

“The Continuation of Carolingian Expansion”. Already written but wrongly as half of a paper which tried to get two theories about the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire into dialogue with each other. Half of it has now gone into ‘Legends’, again; the half that remains was originally built to take on the Pierre Bonnassie version of the ‘feudal transformation’ but I’m now looking at doing that elsewhere too. I may actually have emptied this one as it stands, but the vessel, or rather its reading list, still contains a lot of stuff about post-Carolingian development, the differences between Leonese, Castilian and Catalan ‘feudalism’ and so forth and I’m now thinking this might be where my paper for an eventual issue of a journal that I’ve been asked to coordinate about Carolingian borderlands comes from.

“Critical diplomatic: a tool for analysing early medieval societies”. I’ve been luckier with this one that I ought to have been. It began as chapter 1 of my thesis, a structured rant about how tricky charters are to use unless you consider them as authored texts. I presented a paper based on that at the first of our legendary Leeds sessions, and got feedback that I have since learnt to recognise, from people who didn’t work on this stuff saying ‘wow you’ve really opened my eyes to these sources’ and from people who did but for the High Middle Ages saying ‘but we knew all this, everyone knows this’. This was what it also got from its first two journals, but I eventually found a third one who liked it, but wanted me to turn it into a full-scale introduction to and review of the field. Wow, I said, that’ll take some reading, and alas, I still haven’t had time to do it. I’m very keen on finally writing this as it will probably live longer than anything else I do if I can get it right. But when I can find the time, who knows. It’s an awful lot of work for one article.

“Succession to the fisc in late-Carolingian Catalonia” or some very similar title. An old preoccupation here: do the people who hold power in my area manage to do it by controlling public land? Really? After the Carolingians, the Muslims and the Visigoths had all had their go at altering the Roman fiscus publicus? How much do we even know about the fisc? To do this properly of course I’d need to start at the Roman beginning, fight through all that Durliat stuff and then ask how much was left at each successive stage. Well, maybe later. This one actually has a time and place it’s needed, so it has to stay realisable. Instead, therefore, I’m going to start in my period and look backwards at ways in which public land was claimed or described and see how deep their various roots seem to be. Toponymics and claims to succession will loom large. I have a reading list, it’s not too awfully long, it will be done for Easter and could presumably then be submitted once it’s had its baptism of fire.

So, there’s one at least, and only six months away! So, with my usual luck, it might be out in… 2013? Perhaps there’s something that can be done quicker than that…

Dante’s Divine Comedy has been appropriately called “the poem of desire”, not only because it features desire as the fundamental trait d’union between the self and God, but also because it covers the whole semantic area of this very large concept and its implications. Although rooted in the sensual (if not erotic) love for a woman, it also encompasses the theme of rational desire for knowledge, and combines the two in the spiritual drive towards the divine and the transcendental. Thus, Dante’s magnum opus explores the multiple tensions through which the notion of desire has been articulated and discussed in the diverse cultural fields since antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages ? tensions which still reverberate in modern theories. Desire in Dante’s work questions the tension between lack and fulfillment, absence and presence, and earthly and divine love, with which Western culture had long engaged and would continue to do so.

Dante’s formulation of desire in the Comedy is the result of his long meditation on this concept in his other works (Vita Nuova, Rime, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, Monarchia), as well as his reception of many other discourses of desire in the Christian Middle Ages. Indeed, from courtly literature to theology, from medicine to mysticism, from spirituality and devotional practices to political theory, the question of desire is central to medieval culture, matching, and occasionally surpassing, our contemporary “obsession” with it. Whilst in each of these fields desire has a specific significance and its own terminology, it also transcends the borders of these single disciplines and is a truly inter-discursive feature of medieval culture. Although often in service of normative relations (such as the relation between matter and form, lover and beloved, soul and God), desire can also be subversive, endowed with a protean nature and transformative powers.

This conference takes Dante’s multifaceted discourse of desire as an occasion to investigate medieval concepts of desire in their multiplicity, fragmentation, and interrelation. We therefore invite papers engaging with notions of desire in Dante and/or other authors, contexts, and discourses. We particularly welcome papers that, in addition to close readings of their chosen texts, explicitly address and theorize how desire operates within them. Possible topics include:

desire as a bridge between the human and the divine or between soul and body

See something wrong?

I know my recall isn't perfect, and I'm always anxious to correct mistakes and happy to acknowledge them. If you think a correction is necessary or appropriate, please leave a comment or contact me by e-mail.